Senior Oracle DBA now Learning Informix by Request of Company: I Thought Informix was Dead?
So I've been doing Oracle for almost 20 years now and I've been assigned to learn Informix IDS so I can become a backup Informix DBA. I thought when IBM acquired Informix they would kill it and move everybody to UDB (DB2 for non-mainframe). So what is happenning to the future of Informix? BTW, it seems like a pretty good database. Kinda of a cross between Sybase and Oracle. Help me understand.
cfoughty@gmail.com wrote: I > thought when IBM acquired Informix they would kill it and move > everybody to UDB (DB2 for non-mainframe). That was Janet's grand plan. She apparently failed to consider that DB2 did not have the feature set of of IDS, did not perform as well as IDS in OLTP environments and was far more costly to administer. The Informix customers and business partners gave her an education before her retirement last year. > >So what is happenning to the future of Informix? While many IDS and DB2 customers share similar attributes and have similar needs, IDS has a much more diverse customer base and fills needs that DB2 (or Oracle) cannot. For that reason, IBM now has a multi-data server strategy. While the two data servers will share technology (and the engineering resources applicable) where it makes sense, IDS and DB2 will focus new technology on different market segments. IDS will target high performance OLTP and 'extreme' environments such as the need for an very small footprint or zero administration. DB2 will focus on XML and more general purpose environments. > BTW, it seems like a pretty good database. IDS is an exceptional database. Definitely needs some investment in SQL and a few other areas, but the architecture provides for exceptional performance and ease of administration that is second to none. > Kinda of a cross between > Sybase and Oracle. > The mention of Oracle gives me hives. But, then, the last production upgrade I had to do of Oracle was 6 to 7.